Lessons learned in Asia

An earthquake in Taiwan can make Shanghai's US connectivity completely unusable for days. Going on 6 now; still slower than dial-up 10 years ago.

The great firewall blocking sites like wikipedia, google's cache and wordpress can get annoying. It's also hard to tell if a site is just unreachable or is blocked by the great firewall.

Google knows what the hell they're doing (and nobody else seems to). They're the only US company I've found that has maintained a usable infrastructure in Shanghai through this whole mess. Not Yahoo, not Microsoft, just Google. If Google had a proxy, I could've gotten by pretty nicely.

Localized sites for US companies work fine because they're hosted domestically, but I can't read them (e.g. apple.com.cn).

MacBook Pro power supplies really do melt, and they cost twice as much in Shanghai than retail from Apple in the US. No wonder people outside the US don't buy Apple!